The construction and manufacturing of a product in a typical manufacturing environment requires a work order. The work order is a type of recipe that specifies component requirements and may optionally specify labor requirements for the product in an environment where a user desires to utilize labor requirements. The component requirements are the actual ingredients or parts that comprise the product. The labor requirements are the steps required to put together all of the ingredients or parts in order to construct the product.
A work order is created from a bill of material and optionally a routing. A bill of material is a listing of all the subassemblies, parts, and raw materials that go into a parent assembly or product showing the quantity of each required to construct the parent assembly. A routing typically contains the sequence of operations necessary to construct the parent assembly. The work order combines the necessary bill of material and optionally the routing for the construction of the parent assembly.
Products in make-to-order, assemble-to-order, and engineer-to-order environments usually have options available to a user, and these options may affect the specifications of the product and the content of a work order for the product. For example, in the manufacturing of a speed boat, a user has many choices about the features available for a particular speed boat. Each of these options may affect the work order required to construct the speed boat. In a typical manufacturing system, for every combination of features and options, a separate bill of material and optionally a routing is required to generate the work order. Even if there are only a few available options, the combinations of these options may easily amount to an unmanageable number of bills of materials and routings to cover each combination.
Manufacturing systems have been designed to dynamically create work orders so that a separate predefined bill of material and routing is not needed for each combination of options. Based upon a set of rules, the system may create work orders for a product by following the logic of the set of rules. This same set of rules may create work orders for all the combinations of options. The rules and logical associations of rules need only be defined once, which also eliminates the need for the users of the system to remember the logic and process involved in obtaining each option value and generating work orders.
These manufacturing systems typically only create one work order for a single end item or product. However, products often require multiple work orders because of options that are available for parts comprising end item. For example, a speed boat requires a custom work order for manufacturing the speed boat meeting the specifications defined by the user-selected options. The speed boat may also contain a stereo which has options available to the user. The user may choose, for example, a standard AM/FM stereo or an AM/FM stereo with a compact disk player.
A custom work order is desired for both the speed boat and the stereo, since both have options available to a user. Since the typical manufacturing system may only create one custom work order for the speed boat (the parent end item), the work order for this speed boat would have an ingredient simply identified as stereo. Therefore, the components of the stereo and the operation steps to assemble it would be listed with the components and operations for the speed boat instead of the stereo. A separate custom work order would be desired for the stereo, but would not be available because the system, being single-level, would not have the capability to generate a separate custom work order for that subassembly.
Furthermore, the options for one of the parts may affect the construction of another part within the same end item. For example, the type of stereo chosen by a user may affect the type of dashboard required in the speed boat. A stereo with a compact disk player may require a dashboard with more space for the stereo. However, the dashboard is an ingredient of the work order for the speed boat and is not logically tied in to the work order for the stereo. Without logically related these work orders, a manufacturer may have difficulty in resolving this type of situation.
Also, the manufacturer may construct both the product and parts within the product having options, such as the stereo, which means that the manufacturer needs multiple work orders for the products. For example, the manufacturer may need a work order for both the speed boat and the stereo. If the manufacturing sites for these two parts are in different geographical locations, as is often the case, the manufacturer may have difficulty organizing construction of a product in one location according to one work order and construction of a part for the product in another location according to another work order, especially since the work orders are not logically related within the manufacturing system.
The present invention solves these and other shortcomings of the prior art described above by providing for dynamic creation of multiple custom work orders for a single product or end item and its components. In one embodiment, the present invention may also assign these custom work orders for the subassemblies to different manufacturing sites.
The present invention also solves other shortcomings of the prior art which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification.